Thursday, February 25, 2016

To date, Trump has actually enjoyed more support from Catholic voters than Protestants. Recent polls conducted by Monmouth University showed him with higher vote shares among followers of the Roman Catholic Church than with other Christians. In Iowa, he pulled 44% support from Catholic caucus-goers compared to 24% from Protestants. In New Hampshire polling, he took 30% of the Catholic vote, which was slightly higher than his 26% share among Protestants. In South Carolina, he currently holds 42% of the Catholic vote compared with 32% of the Protestant vote.

I find support for Trump in general to be baffling, particularly amongst Christians but disappointingly so amongst Catholics.

As the father of three daughters, I reserved the right to interview their dates. Seemed only fair to me. After all, my wife and I’d spent 16 or 17 years feeding them, dressing them, funding braces, and driving them to volleyball tournaments and piano recitals. A five-minute face-to-face with the guy was a fair expectation. I was entrusting the love of my life to him. For the next few hours, she would be dependent upon his ability to drive a car, avoid the bad crowds, and stay sober. I wanted to know if he could do it. I wanted to know if he was decent.

This was my word: “decent.” Did he behave in a decent manner? Would he treat my daughter with kindness and respect? Could he be trusted to bring her home on time? In his language, actions, and decisions, would he be a decent guy?

Decency mattered to me as a dad.

Decency matters to you. We take note of the person who pays their debts. We appreciate the physician who takes time to listen. When the husband honors his wedding vows, when the teacher makes time for the struggling student, when the employee refuses to gossip about her co-worker, when the losing team congratulates the winning team, we can characterize their behavior with the worddecent.

The leading candidate to be the next leader of the free world would not pass my decency interview. I’d send him away. I’d tell my daughter to stay home. I wouldn’t entrust her to his care.

I don’t know Mr. Trump. But I’ve been chagrined at his antics. He ridiculed a war hero. He made mockery of a reporter’s menstrual cycle. He made fun of a disabled reporter. He referred to the former first lady, Barbara Bush as “mommy,” and belittled Jeb Bush for bringing her on the campaign trail. He routinely calls people “stupid,” “loser,” and “dummy.” These were not off-line, backstage, overheard, not-to-be-repeated comments. They were publicly and intentionally tweeted, recorded, and presented.

Such insensitivities wouldn’t even be acceptable even for a middle school student body election. But for the Oval Office? And to do so while brandishing a Bible and boasting of his Christian faith? I’m bewildered, both by his behavior and the public’s support of it.

The stock explanation for his success is this: he has tapped into the anger of the American people. As one man said, “We are voting with our middle finger.” Sounds more like a comment for a gang-fight than a presidential election. Anger-fueled reactions have caused trouble ever since Cain was angry at Abel.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

When Walt Richardson and his wife, Helen, were blessed with eight children, he worked multiple jobs to support them.

When he was selected to be one of the first black men to integrate the Air Force, he rose above the racism that surrounded him.

“You don’t let these things make you bitter,” he taught his children. “You use them to make you better.”

Richardson was 85 when he died early Saturday morning at his home in Fort Walton Beach. Funeral arrangements are pending.

He was one of the original Tuskegee airmen, a gifted entertainer, a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and a deacon at St. Mary Catholic Church.

Despite the cancer that had spread through his body, he worked right up to the end of his life, with a March 21 fall at his house triggering a rapid decline.

“He said, ‘Let me go with my boots on,” said Pat Richardson, his second oldest son. “Don’t put me in a home. Let me take it to end.”

And he did, breathing his last at 4:05 a.m., hours after his son, Henri, sang “Wind Beneath My Wings,” to him from California.

“I think all he did was he hung on until he heard everybody’s voice, and he was done,” Pat said. “Henri sang him into where he needed to go.”

His wife called him Walt, friends called him Deacon Richardson, his children called him Dad.

To Pat – his only son to follow him into the military – he was “Chief,” short for Chief Master Sergeant, the rank Richardson achieved in the Air Force.

Born and raised in Pensacola, Richardson joined the Air Force in 1949 and was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in 1951.

He was one of 1,000 black enlisted men selected to integrate the Air Force. The men were warned that it would be the biggest fight they would face.

Richardson didn’t know he was one of the original Tuskegee airmen until Congressman Jeff Miller’s office found his name on a list a few years back.

“He knew he was something,” says Pat. “He just didn’t know what.”

When Richardson came to Eglin, he and his family were not allowed to attend squadron dinners. In fact, some members of the squadron would give Richardson money to take his wife and children somewhere else.

He was also not allowed to drink out of the water fountain. Instead, he filled up an empty Coke bottle with water when he was thirsty.

Pat remembers going to pick up his dad at work and being handed a Coca-Cola bottle full of water to drink – something Pat didn’t question. As a child, he couldn’t conceive of a world where his lips wouldn’t be allowed to touch a water fountain because he was black.

He didn’t realize it was part of the discrimination his dad faced every day.

The Richardson family stayed close over the decades even as the children grew up and moved to other states.

They had regular family conferences, using Skype and Facetime. They prayed the rosary together on Sunday mornings, using technology to bring them together.

One of Richardson’s most powerful legacies was as a father. He taught his children to pray often and well.

“Let’s say a Hail Mary on that,” he’d say. And his children learned, no matter where they were to do just that.

He taught them how to be good parents by example. He was fun, but took time to listen before guiding them to a decision.

“As a parent, you don’t get a report card,” says his son, Bill. “I made sure he understood he got an A-plus from me.”

After his fall on March 21, his health declined rapidly. In his last days, their small Fort Walton Beach home filled with people who’d been touched by Richardson.

One was a young man with a cast on his leg. He told Helen that he’d gotten in an accident and her husband had stopped to pray with him while they waited for the ambulance.

“He’s such a people person,” Helen says. “They’re attracted to him. They stop and listen. He guides them.”

Every day with her husband was an adventure, she says, one that they’d sit down at night and discuss.

“You can’t solve the problems of the world,” she says.” But we tried.”

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Best-selling author Vince Flynn, who wrote the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thriller series and sold more
than 15 million books in the U.S. alone, died Wednesday in Minnesota after a more than two-year battle with prostate cancer, according to friends and his publisher. He was 47.

Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, "Term Limits," in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a local best-seller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal -- and "Term Limits" became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.

The St. Paul-based author also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, "The Last Man," was published last year.

He counted former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton among his fans, as well as foreign leaders and intelligence community figures.

"As good as Vince was on the page -- and he gave millions of readers countless hours of pleasure -- he was even more engaging in person," said Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of his publisher, Simon & Schuster. "Yes, we will miss the Mitch Rapp stories that are classic modern thrillers, but we will miss Vince even more."

Flynn died at a hospital in St. Paul, surrounded by about 35 relatives and friends who prayed the Rosary, said longtime family friend Kathy Schneeman. She said his deep Catholic faith was an important part of his character.

"That's what he would have liked. He talks about his faith just as much as he would talk about politics and current events with our group of friends," Schneeman said.

Flynn was born to an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, the fifth of seven children. After graduating with an economics degree from the University of St. Thomas in 1988, he went to work as an account and sales marketing specialist with Kraft General Foods. That marketing background later came in handy as he promoted "Term Limits."

Wanting a new challenge, he quit Kraft in 1990 when he landed an aviation candidate slot with the Marine Corps, but he was later disqualified due to seizures he suffered following a childhood car accident. Thwarted from becoming a military aviator, he got the idea of writing thrillers.

"If (Tom) Clancy could do it, why can't I?" Flynn said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press.

He went to work for the Twin Cities based commercial real estate company United Properties and started working on a book idea in his spare time. Two years later, he quit so he could devote more time to writing and moved to Colorado. He began working on what became "Term Limits," a story about assassins who targeted fat-cat congressmen.

A man of almost superhero powers, Mitch Rapp races the clock to foil terrorists' plans to detonate a nuclear warhead in Washington in "Memorial Day" (2004), battles terrorists who seize the White House and take hostages in "Transfer of Power" (1999) and is out for vengeance after a Saudi billionaire puts a bounty on his head in "Consent to Kill" (2005).

Flynn told the AP that with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, he decided to write about terrorism.

I so enjoyed his novels, the first few particularly and did not know he was devoutly Catholic.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

"I mourn a great hero," said Oliver Stone of the Venezuelan president who died on Tuesday after a long
bout with cancer.

...

"Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion," says Penn in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela."

...

''I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place," says Stone in a statement to THR. "Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history."

Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion.”

“The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” said Brewer in an analysis published in their website.

...

“We believe that organized bolivarian criminal groups within the Chávez administration have subtracted around $100 billion out of the nearly $1 trillion in oil income made by PDVSA since 1999.”

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Planned Parenthood personnel have aborted over 5,300,000 children since 1970. That’s equal to the entire population of Colorado. In 2009, 97.6 percent of Planned Parenthood’s “services" for pregnant women involved killing their children, and only 2.4 percent involved prenatal care or adoption referral.

Roe has never been accepted by the American people as a whole as a valid constitutional decision. It is widely regarded, even among liberal academics, as poorly reasoned—at best. Many scholars and others (including more than a few who are not pro-life in their moral and political convictions) regard it as a glaring (and even embarrassing) example of the judicial usurpation of authority left by the Constitution in the hands of the people and their elected representatives. EvenRoe’s diehard supporters tend to defend it on the grounds that it is an “established precedent,” not on the grounds that it is correct as a matter of constitutional interpretation.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta summarized the legacy of Roe when she said 'America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe vs. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts – a child – as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.' "

If we would open our hearts to the the sorrow with which God aches we too would ache for the millions of babies, and children, and young people, and whole families which He willed to entrust to our care, but who are not here because of what we have willed. We must weep over our own blind self-deception in believing that any decision regarding life is private affair. We are all implicated in one another's decisions irrespective of whether we are male or female, friends or enemies, atheists or believers. The decision not to welcome or protect life is always a social reality, the most inhumane form of social poverty that can inflict any family or community -- and God's heart can only weep over us for having fallen into such misery.

By prayer and fasting there is still the opportunity that we might be pierced to the heart. It is still possible for us to know compunction over the fact that instead of protecting motherhood and supporting those whose desperate situations drove them to despair, we viewed their plight as an inconvenience that needed to be dispatched as efficiently as possible. Sorrow can still drive us to the hope of prayer and by this hope to a new beginning.

If heaven is dismayed that we who have been blessed far beyond anything we ever deserved chose to be callous towards those who most needed our help, our encouragement, our love -- we still may yet be astonished by the mercy of God in which even the evil of our personal decisions finds its limit. In prayer, the tears of faith access the power of God who in unimaginable mercy is waiting to heal the alienation and coldness of heart our own actions have brought on ourselves. In such holy conversation with the One who knows the deepest truth of our hearts, baptized in holy tears of repentance and gratitude, the grace of a change of heart yearns to unfold and new possibilities that we cannot imagine await us.

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now,
Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney's favorables are above Obama's now. Yes, you read that right. Romney's favorables are higher than Obama's right now. That gender gap that was Obama's firewall? Over in one night:

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That's terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney - even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest).

...

A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.